by Ben Okri
‘I am a politician!’ he said.
‘We don’t want politicians like you,’ said one of the bouncers.
‘Why not?’
‘Go away. If you are a politician you won’t gatecrash.’
‘Did I crash your gate?’ Dad replied indignantly. ‘I don’t have a car.’
‘Just go away.’
Dad began to shout insults. He made such a fuss that the bouncer sent for the thugs. They came and bundled Dad out and dumped him near the forest. He came storming back, his jacket covered in mud, dried leaves in his hair, his plaster flapping. He went to the bouncer and knocked him out with a single roundhouse punch.
‘If it’s only gatecrashers you respect, then I am coming in,’ Dad said.
The thugs fell on him. He threw one of them on the bonnet of a car. He winded a second with a punch to the solar plexus. He was quivering with energy; his eyes had a manic glimmer. Someone screamed. Madame Koto came out, saw what was happening, told the thugs to stop fighting, and very politely asked Dad to come into the party. I followed him. The beggar girl followed me. At the door I encountered the blind old man. He had a new instrument, a harmonica. He wore yellow glasses and a red hat.
‘What do you want?’ he asked me.
‘To come in.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘You ugly child. Show me your friends and I will eat them.’
I pushed past his wheelchair and went into the celebrations. There were actually fewer people at the event than it appeared from the outside. Or maybe they were all somewhere else, at the event behind the event. The noise from the musical equipment was very loud. I saw giants and midgets. I saw a white man with silver eyelashes dancing with a woman whose abundant breasts brought flames to his face. The long tables tumbled with fruit and fried meat, rice and platters of sweet-smelling stews, vegetables and plastic cutlery. Everywhere I looked the lights affected me. Crowded spaces suddenly became empty. And in the emptiness I saw the ghost forms of white men in helmets supervising the excavation of precious stones from the rich earth. The excavation was done with spectral machines. I saw the ghost figures of young men and women, heads bowed, necks and ankles chained together, making their silent procession through the celebrations. They kept moving but stayed in the same place. Over them the celebrants danced to the music of a new era that promised Independence. The men of politics, the chiefs, with their wrappers, their agbadas, their fans, the women with lace and red shoes, the paid helpers, the praise-singers, all danced vigorously, sweating, smiling. Madame Koto wandered in agony through the celebrants, her bad foot weighing her down, her head slumped to one side like a disconsolate Masquerade, her face shining with good living. It was strange to see her grown much more beautiful as she got more swollen. An expression of profound disdain hung involuntarily on her lips. An orchestrator of fantastic events, she walked right through the forms of the enchained procession and began sneezing so hard that she twisted her neck. Her women came and led her into the inner sanctum of the bar.
Dad went around talking politics. He looked miserable in his black French suit. Everyone he talked to looked at him quizzically and took a handkerchief to their noses. The women refused to dance with him. Dad paused at a corner, nibbling a piece of goats’ meat, looking confused. I wandered amongst the large parrots in cages, saw featherless chickens twitching on plates, and encountered a duiker tied to a post. It kept staring at me. Its eyes were big and changed colour and it had a white bib of beard reaching down to its haunches and it had a powerful smell and it stood still while everyone danced under the heat of the tent. I saw men dancing with political erections. Sweat and sexual potency filled the air. Dancing women generated heat-waves with the gyrations of their bottoms. At one end of the party a chained monkey kept snatching off the wigs of prostitutes. A politician was contemplating a woman’s quivering buttocks when the monkey snatched the piece of fried antelope from his hands. The monkey hid. The politician looked round. He fetched himself another piece of fried meat and resumed his contemplation. The same thing happened. He left with the woman soon afterwards. Then I noticed hands crawling under the tables. The music became louder. Someone gave me something to drink. It was very strong and I drank it all and had some more. The earth quivered under the assault of music and dancing. The multicoloured bulbs swayed. Beneath the tables hands with three fingers, legs with two wide-spaced toes, wandered around without touching the ground. Buckets of food floated through the air with no one carrying them. The food vanished beneath the tables. When the music stopped a midget came to the platform and sang the praises of the eternal Party of the Rich. Then he proceeded to swallow cowrie beads and bring them out of his ears. The blind old man played on his harmonica, green liquid dripping from his eyes. The people clapped and cheered and drank to the health of the party, to its long future domination of the nation, and to Madame Koto. The music was resumed. The blind old man staggered all over the place, very drunk, guided by a woman in a blue wrapper and matching blouse. When he banged against people he would pull up stiffly and say:
‘Ah, a party!’
When he staggered into women he would laugh and stick out his bony hands, searching for their breasts. The women paid him much attention. He was led to his chair. He danced there like an overturned centipede. The women kept bringing him drinks. He drank heavily, looking through his yellow spectacles at the celebrations, occasionally saying:
‘Ah, Ladies of the Night!’
The parrots squawked noisily in their cages. The duiker eyed me. I stared back into its eyes of deep colours. I stared into its hypnotic eyes and felt myself being drawn into its consciousness, I felt myself filling with unease and anxiety. When that moment passed, nausea and bile rising in my throat, I found myself in a yellow forest, bounding through the emerald spangles of cobwebs. Stars fell from the night sky, plunged into the forest earth, and formed deep pits. I galloped in dreams of abundant energies through the great jungles, bristling with the freedom of the wind and four feet and the soaring spirit that disintegrates the frames of all night-runners. As I bounded along I saw the forms of serene ancestors, men and women for whom the stars were both words and gods, for whom the world and the sky and the earth were a vast language of dreams and omens. I passed the stone monoliths of the deep nights of transition, when the beings of an earlier time were creators first before they were hunters; I passed the clusters of the abodes of spirits. I was the messenger of the wind. The spirits rode with me, played with the language of my speed, the riddles of my words. They looked deep into my eyes and I understood. I ran through the night forests, where all forms are mutable, where all things exchange their identities, and where everything dances in an exultation of flame and wisdom. I ran till I came to the Atlantic, silver and blue under the night of forests. Birds flew in the aquamarine sky. Feathers gyrated on to the waves. The sky was full of dense white clouds moving like invading armies of mist and ghosts over the deep serene blue and under the regenerative stars. The ghost ships of centuries arrived endlessly on the shores. I saw the flotillas, the gunwales, the spectral great ships and the dozens of rowing boats, bearing the helmeted ones, with mirrors and guns and strange texts untouched by the salt of the Atlantic. I saw the ships and the boats beach. The white ones, ghost forms on deep nights, stepped on our shores, and I heard the earth cry. The cry scared me. Deep in the duiker’s eyes, I ran through the yellow forests, through deluded generations, through time. I witnessed the destruction of great shrines, the death of mighty trees that housed centuries of insurgent as well as soothing memories, sacred texts, alchemical secrets of wizards, and potent herbs. I saw the forests die. I saw the people grow smaller in being. I saw the death of their many roads and ways and philosophies. Their precious stones and rocks of atomic energies were drawn from the depths of their ancestral memories. I saw the trees retreat screaming into the blue earth. I heard the great spirits of the land and forest talking of a temporary exile. They travelled deeper into secret spaces
, weaving spells of madness round their arcane abodes to prevent humans from ever despoiling their transformative retreat from the howling feet of invaders. I saw the rising of new houses. I saw new bridges span the air. The old bridges, invisible, travelled on by humans and spirits alike, remained intact and less frequented. As the freedom of space and friendship with the pied kingfisher and other birds became more limited with the new age, something died in me. I fled deep into the salt-caves of rocklands. Hunters with new instruments of death followed. When human beings and animals understood one another, we were all free. But now the hunters pursued me in the duiker’s eyes. And as I escaped into the forest of thunder, whose invisible gates are sealed with seven incantations, a knock crashed on my head. A flaming star spun me round. Laughter rocketed me into a silver emptiness. I opened my eyes and found myself cradled by a female midget. Her eyes were enormous and sad. I tried to get up and shake the confusion from my head, but she held me down tightly. Eighteen eyes regarded me. Beyond the eyes I saw the duiker gazing at me intently, drugged on its captivity, gazing at me as if my freedom lay in freeing it from imminent death, from being sacrificed for the opening of the road of Madame Koto’s destiny.
6
‘OH, MY FRIEND, you’ve woken up!’ the female midget said to me.
She wore a white dress with lace frills and imitation sequins. I had seen her before. She had a demented smile stretched tightly across her face. Her eyes were moon-like and when I looked into them the insides of my head kept shifting. The eyes of the duiker pulled me. Warm, old, magnetic, they spoke a language of mood and blood.
‘I asked you to dance with me, but you refused,’ the midget said, flashing her weird animated smile.
She took my hands and placed them on her big frantic breasts. They palpitated like two mighty hearts. The female midget quivered, the smile became fainter on her face. She stared at me with such frightening tenderness and longing that I broke out in a sweat. She dragged me to the dance floor, and amidst bemused laughter from the other celebrants, drew me into the pounding rhythms of the music. She held me tightly to her breasts and drenched me in the strange sexuality of her soft body and before I was aware of it I was swirling amongst the sturdy legs of adults. She turned me round, threw herself at me, shook her breasts in my face, and clasped my young bottom, and clung to me, made me dizzy, and dissolved things around me, in her torrid dance. She kept spinning me, filling my head with bizarre potencies of desire, her smile widening. She held me so tight that the blood threatened to burst drunkenly in my ears. Red lights flooded my brain and when my eyes cleared, the smells of a thousand perfumes, of wild sex on hot illicit nights, of vaginal fluids, of animal sweat, overpowered my senses. In the terrible heat of the dance I saw that, among the erotic dancers, the politicians and chiefs, the power merchants, the cultists, paid supporters, thugs and prostitutes, all moving to the beat of the new music, among them all, there were strangers to the world of the living. I saw that some of the prostitutes, who would be future brides of decadent power, had legs of goats. Some of the women, who were chimeras and sirens and broken courtesans, had legs of spiders and birds. Some of the politicians and power merchants, the chiefs and innocent-looking men, who were satyrs and minotaurs and satanists, had the cloven hoofs of bulls. Their hoofs and bony legs were deftly covered with furry skin. Fully clothed, they danced as men and women when in fact they were the dead, spirits, and animals in disguise, part-time human beings dancing to the music of ascendant power. Everything around me seemed to be changing and yielding its form. I cried out. The female midget swirled me round. Tables flew towards me. They flew through me. And I was twirling, dizzy, my being in disintegration, dancing not with a female midget but with the four-headed spirit who had been biding his time. I was falling in love with life and the four-headed spirit had chosen the best moment to dance with me, turning and twisting me through strange spaces, making me dance my way out of the world of the living. The lights turned violet. Still in a dance which I couldn’t control, I found myself in a desert waste where shadows were real things, where the sand blew in the air and fixed into the shapes of fabulous glass monsters. The four-headed spirit led me in a dance through the desert, holding me in an iron grip. The harder I fought the tougher the grip became, till my arms turned blue. He danced me through the desert winds, which concealed the forms of master spirits and powerful beings who borrowed the sandstorms to clothe their nakedness; through the striated sands, over the vast desert worms, through the mirage cities in which the liquid apparitions of air concealed cities throbbing in rich bazaars and marketplaces and dens of hallucinations; he danced me through the mirage cities where tall women had breasts of glass and beautiful women had the phosphorescent tails of cats, over the wells, past the oasis where obscure figures turned silver into water, through the streets of the elite quarters where people cried out for love, past the slave alleys where innumerable souls had written their names on the walls with their flesh, along the precincts of drugged soldiers, the garrisons of slave towns, into the heart of forgotten civilisations where Pythagoras came to learn mathematics, into the sacred groves of desert gods, and the empty houses of reincarnated prophets, and the great wastes of desert stretches which were in fact populated with adventurous tribes and warring beings and people who had become their own stone carvings, through it all the four-headed spirit led me in its dance of death. I beheld the Sphinx, with its original black face. I was plunged into sandstorms and whirlwinds, the sands howling, and I saw the invisible trees and plants, the meadows of flowers with passionate calyxes, all ghosts of the vegetation that used to be there. And I was thrust up through the burning vents of sandwhorls and I felt so hot, my head bursting with fires, my eyes full of steaming sand, and when I cried out the music of the desert gods drowned my cry. I fought to escape. I struggled, I kicked. I did not want deserts in me. And as we neared the scorching centre of the desert, where a ship in full mast waited to set sail, the four-headed spirit said:
‘That ship will take us home to your companions across the oceans of sand.’
Then a new music, composed entirely of desert vowels, poured over me and filled me with anguish. I called out to the great king of the spirit world, but he didn’t appear. And so I called out, with all my being, for Mum. Out of the stillness of a strange love, I saw her in a tattered wig, a pair of blue glasses on her face, bangles on her arms. She wore a bright wrapper and a blouse blinding in its whiteness. She stood over me and lifted me up. The desert burned its way into my brain, scorching my head. The calmness of cool water flowed down my face and Mum, in the gentlest voice said:
‘Azaro, why are you crying?’
She held me gently. The midget had gone. The four-headed spirit had evaporated into the mysteries of dance. I couldn’t see the giants any more, or the hoofs of part-time human beings, those who would wreck our hopes for two generations, or the bird-feet of strange women. Forms had lost their mutability.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Mum asked.
I held on to her. She wiped the tears from my face. My throat was dry. I stayed silent for a long time. Occasionally a cool wind blew in from outside. Mum gave me some iced water to drink. I drank it all and had some more. Then after a while, when I began to feel a little better, I looked up at her. She smiled.
‘We watched you dancing, my son. You danced like your grandfather. And then you fell. Are you all right now?’
I didn’t answer her question.
‘Why are you wearing those blue glasses?’ I asked her.
She laughed.
‘I will tell you later. It’s a good story.’
‘Tell me now.’
‘There’s too much noise. Where is Madame Koto?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you help me find her, I will tell you the story when we get home.’
I set out to search for Madame Koto. Everyone I asked said they had just seen her. The beautiful beggar girl, sitting under a table, watched me as I went up and down
. I was about to ask her a question when she motioned me to be quiet. She pointed. I followed her finger with my gaze and saw that the beggars were carrying out a complicated stealing operation. They grabbed fruits and fried meat and bowls of stew and plates of rice from the tables and passed them on in a relay of hands. The food disappeared beneath the tent. Helen was their watch-woman.
‘Do you want me to help?’
She waved me on.
‘Can’t you talk?’
She stared at me mutely and then, gently, pushed me away.
7
ONE OF THE politicians was plastering money on the sweating breasts of a woman who had danced with unbounded sensual ferocity. Dad was having a heated argument with a man in a red hat. The man kept pushing Dad away and Dad kept coming back. Mum went over to him and held his fists and soon they were dancing together. It was the first time in a while that I had seen them dance. I continued with my search for Madame Koto. In the bar the women were serving bowls of steaming peppersoup. I was given a plate and I drank hurriedly and had to have some palm-wine to extinguish the heat the pepper generated in my brain. The wine swam in my eyes. I staggered to the backyard. The duiker held me with its brilliant eyes. The eyes held me fast and I carried on walking while still looking at it and I crashed into a woman bearing a tray of food. The plates fell everywhere, the food tumbled to the ground. The beggars materialised from the night and scraped together the fallen food and vanished again. The woman swore at me. I swore back at her. She picked up a piece of firewood and chased me all over the backyard. I ran into the bushes and into the figure of Madame Koto. She started and stood very straight. Her eyes were blurred, as if she were in some sort of trance or in a moment of passionate anguish. She stank of odd perfumes, queer aromas, of flint and hyena-hides, feathers and old trees.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘Go to your father.’